In Germany, there used tobe the idea of "Wandel duch Handel", i.e. "change through trade", i.e. "if we hust trade enough with people, they will eventually end up being a democracy and open society".
I think this was a reasonable ide to try out.
But - just like "trickle down economics", we tried it, and it quite obviously didn't work, and we sadly have to lock things down now with more export controls and less tech and knowledge transfer.
I have no idea if this isolation policy is necessarily better, especially beacuse it means that the different players (the "west", China and India and other) will compete directly with everything. And that would require us westerns to get our act together better and be way more pragmatic. This might be a good or a bad thing. No idea.
One example is the chinese and indian space program - especially the former was quite isolated from the 'west', and it's doing huge advances every year. Compare that to Europe's incredibly risk-adverse and slow progress over the last years. Thankfully, SpaceX is innovating like crazy. But everybody must get their hands dirty and just get shit done, if we want to compete in the long term.

Maybe i'm understanding something wrong, but shouldn't an arc furnace be 100% energy efficient? All losses should, after all, end up as heat, too?

Apple TV is something completely different from Chromecasts.

Chromcasts are, on purpose, very dumb and cheap. The phone tells them what to show.

Apple TV is more like Android TV: a whole computer running an OS and apps and all that.

Chromecast is great, because it makes a dumb (or wannabe smart) TV usable in a quick, easy and cheap way.

They didn't change those rules, actually. Your son can still watch Netflix on his GFs laptop quite often (counts as 'travelling'). He just has to also watch come Netflix from your household once in a while, which I think is fair. I live in Costa Rica, where Netflix beta-tested their crackdown. We have cheaper plans than the USA plans, luckily. My mother-in-law was sharing our account and quite annoying nag screens started to appear on her TV, asking for 2FA logins and all that. We could have gone on with that, but was really quite annoying. So now we pay I think 3$ extra, and she got her own seperate account. Seems like a really fair price to me.

I tried to Google it, but couldn't find anything. Could you please elaborate what that Greek doctor story is about?

“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue” - Gaben

I think this also applies to the ad-blocking problem.
I, for one, don't block ads. But I would love to have an option of "continue, for free, with ads OR pay $0.10 for this download with one click". I.e. microstransactions.
There is/was this company where you could say "I want to pay 10$ per month.". Then, those 10$ would get split between participating websites that you use in that month.
Things like that should, IMHO, make the web a better place. But they somehow didn't take off. And I won't pay a monthly subscription fee for downloading some random file or reading one random article. And I can't be bothered to pay something like $0.1 using Paypal or whatever.

I am more of a MQTT fan myself, but does anyone know how Matter...actually works?
Like, how can I build an e.g. perl script or ESP8266 thing that acts like a Matter device, similar to building an MQTT client?
Would the (virtual) device somehow need to be approved in order to work with Google Home or Homekit? Do they auto-detect?
Matter seems to be a "proprietary standard for home automation that is royalty-free, with manufacturers only incurring certification costs" according to Wikipedia, which doesn't really help much.
Please note that I am confused about Matter (protocol), not Thread (the optional RF coms layer, if I understood correctly)

I'm looking forward to very low cost MRI scanners with preliminary AI diagnostics.
So many diseases like cancer are really not THAT bad if we would catch them very early. So a weekly, quick MRI scan could help with catching them early.

I think (us) "IT people" also tend a little bit towards the rational, and many disdain irrational edicts.
I have no problem at all being called into the office for some valid reason, and even a couple of face-to-face meetings or lunches to schmooze a bit.
But if someone gives me an irrational order like "you have to be here for 'reasons', and because that's just the way things are done!" it really pisses me off and demotivated me a lot.
In my experience, workers in other fields are more used to these kind of shenanigans and it doesn't affect tham that much as it does people that literally work in logic and clear and clean thought processes (e.g. programming)

Yea, I know. 640kb should be enough for anybost and all that, but:
How much speed do the mayority of users really need?
Obviously, the change to SSDs was awesome, but at some point, I don't really see the benefit of even more GB/s outside of datacenter and niche applications?
Same for internet speed, actually. I have something like 100MB/s which is way more than enough for anything I can really think of. So what's the benefot of e.g. Gigabit internet?

Many old, cheap and shitty CCTV cameras still run in an ActiveX thing inside IE, for inexplicable reasons.
Does anyone know if there's a standalone app to be able to run these after IE is finally dead?

I recently was forced to switch a client from Thunderbird to Outlook (desktop). And whil Outlook does look more modern, I am impressed how shitty it is. It constantly hangs, complains about strange file size limitations and is overall just incredibly buggy. Thunderbird just simply worked. But someone told the CEO that "all the professionals use Outlook" - but I still haven't gotten a good explanaition on why. We have lost countless hurs of productivity and extra troubleshooting because of this P.O.S. Outlook Desktop (using Office 365 hosted emails, no less!)
That being said, I think client-side email programs are dead. Webmail IMAP clients are simply way better for 95% of use cases. Be it paid for or self-hosted.

I insist that part of standard education should be running a small online ad campaign.
Selecting target groups, keywords, dealing with optiimization settings, A/B testing headlines, and so on.
I think that this is the only way for people to really internalize how the modern internet's content works. This also explains tracking and data collection.

"Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything."
It's just a Nibbles/Snake game.

I use Google Keep, or, quite often, Google Sheets.
Small tip: if you use the URL "sheets.new", and are logged into your Google account, you immediatly get a blank Google sheet.